How Katrina Changed Eating in New Orleans

On the weekend of New Year’s Eve in 2005, Frank Brigtsen cooked the most memorable meals of his life. They were the first meals served at Brigtsen’s, his restaurant in New Orleans, when it reopened four months after Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Brigtsen’s has been around for twenty-nine years, inside a squat cottage in a neighborhood called Riverbend, named for its proximity to a hairpin turn in the Mississippi River. Riverbend, which is on a piece of high ground known locally as the Sliver by the River, was one of the lucky communities not flooded in the storm.

The fact that Brigtsen’s escaped flood damage did not diminish the celebration around its reopening. Reasons to rejoice were scarce during the mostly wrenching 2005 holiday season, and New Orleanians had spent months cheering accomplishments far less divine than Brigtsen’s pan-fried-puppy-drum meunière. The city’s long-term viability was far from certain at the time. Quarrels that would define the Katrina Decade—over housing, schools, race, insurance money, FEMA money, the provenance of shellfish—were already underway. Even neighborhoods that stayed dry, like Riverbend, and Faubourg Marigny, remained eerily black at night, and soldiers still patrolled the streets.

The gratitude shown to restaurants that reopened during this uncertain period was hard-earned. Anna Nguyen, the co-owner of Nine Roses, a Vietnamese-Chinese restaurant across the river from Brigtsen’s, in Gretna, had to drive to Houston to procure fresh snow-pea leaves, watercress, basil, and mint for her kitchen. Domilise’s, the embodiment of a New Orleans po-boy joint, reopened only once it could serve its sandwiches on fresh-baked, crisp-skinned bread from Leidenheimer, a local baking company founded more than a hundred years ago. The Uptown diner Slim Goodies fed omelets to the first responders after the storm. I still carry admiration for the staffers who scraped crumbs from pressed linens during my early post-Katrina meals at restaurants such as Herbsaint, Bourbon House, and Restaurant August—all high-end places that reopened at a time when you couldn’t count on potable water. These examples of grit and vivacity, performed by residents whose limited means were stretched by personal losses, did more than give credence to clichés about the South’s inimitable hospitality. They offered locals an argument for keeping the city going.

On Brigtsen’s reopening weekend, Marna Brigtsen, Frank’s wife and business partner, advised waitresses to go easy on the mascara. The restaurant’s service on New Year’s Eve ended with the proprietors posing for photographs on the front steps as the blare of a marching brass band drew closer—a second-line parade welcoming Brigtsen’s back. It was that moment, Frank Brigtsen said, “that nailed home what it means to be a restaurant in New Orleans.” The temporary erasure of a customer’s hunger was no longer the primary objective for a restaurateur in the city. “It's not filling their tummies,” Brigtsen told me. “It's giving them the whole weight of New Orleans culture.”

Brigtsen, who is sixty, came of age professionally in an era when New Orleans restaurateurs were helping to establish the city as a magnet for tourists looking to escape generic America. In the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, he worked under Paul Prudhomme, the legendary Cajun chef, first at Commander’s Palace, a onetime plantation house in the Garden District where Prudhomme was the first non-European-born executive chef, and then at K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen, Prudhomme’s own place in the French Quarter. These restaurants and others treated south Louisiana’s vernacular cuisines—both the Cajun traditions of rural Acadiana and the polyglot Creole styles that flowered in the city—as worthy of a reverence previously reserved for French cooking. Visitors returned home from the city rhapsodizing about thick gumbos, butter-glistening fillets of Gulf finfish, and the cavalier deployment of smoked sausage.

Brigtsen joined the blossoming movement by fusing the lessons he learned at Commander’s Palace and K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen. His restaurant splits the difference, atmospherically and aesthetically, between the grand, entrenched Creole institutions and the neighborhood joints serving the fried seafood and the pot-simmered dishes found in home kitchens from the Lower Ninth Ward to Lafayette. His definition of New Orleans Creole is urban and pan-ethnic, drawing on the food of Africa, France, Spain, Latin America, Sicily, and elsewhere.

Even before Katrina, restaurants in New Orleans offered much more than indigenous cooking. There has been exceptional Vietnamese food here for decades, for instance, and the city’s idiosyncratic collection of steak houses should invite more comparisons to Buenos Aires. And since Katrina, the local palate has continued to broaden. Mexican moles and the dishes and ingredients of Southeast Asia are now so common on New Orleans restaurant menus that their presence hardly warrants mentioning. Two of the best and most popular restaurants to open since the turn of this decade are Pêche Seafood Grill, whose signature dish is a whole roasted Gulf fish in salsa verde, and Shaya, which serves Israeli food, including oblong balloons of fresh-baked pita bread. But in the years following the storm, it was the cooking at restaurants like Brigtsen’s, with its baked oysters, panéed rabbit loins, shrimp rémoulade, and bread pudding, that generated the most attention, as citizens and artists worked to preserve an endangered culture.

“New Orleans is such a cuisine de terroir,” Brigtsen said. “If you grow up with it, it will always be your language. It will always be the style of music that you play.”

But the fruits of New Orleans’s culinary tradition have never been equally distributed. There are at least eleven per cent more restaurants in New Orleans today than there were when the storm hit, even though the city’s population has dropped. Very few members of the majority African-American population, though, were among the diners participating in the communal catharsis that unfolded in local restaurants in the years after the storm. The recently released results of a Louisiana State University study show that while four out of five white residents believe that New Orleans has mostly recovered from the storm, nearly three out of five African-American residents believe that it has not.

In 2012, the Lower Ninth Ward, a solidly black neighborhood, welcomed the opening of Cafe Dauphine. It’s the kind of sit-down, tablecloth restaurant that didn’t exist in the neighborhood prior to Katrina. Dauphine’s crab cakes are excellent, but residents are perhaps still too widely dispersed to enjoy them in large numbers: many streets in the Lower Nine still appear to have been freeze dried in 2006. On high ground, new food businesses have become instruments of provocation. The St. Roch Market, a hall of boutique food stalls built inside an abandoned building in a gentrifying neighborhood, was vandalized shortly after its spring opening. Last week, three gunmen robbed diners who were still finishing their meals at Patois, a bistro of post-Katrina vintage in an affluent stretch of Uptown.

Given the persistence of this social bifurcation, it is hard to imagine New Orleans falling prey to the shade-grown coffee beans and nettle-studded burrata of Brooklyn and San Francisco. The strengths of the city’s modern restaurant scene suggest that the real agent of change in New Orleans is less ethnic than it is socioeconomic.

New Orleans isn’t just a better place to eat today than it was in 2005; it has become more delicious with each passing year. Part of this has to do with the continued excellence of its high-end restaurants, but the bigger reason is the growing diversity of dining options. New Orleans restaurants no longer hawk traditional food as if mandated by law. (In 2001, my first full year as a restaurant critic at the Times-Picayune, nearly half of the restaurants I reviewed served gumbo—and I was shooting for variety.) According to a report from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, post-Katrina New Orleans has seen a spike in residents with bachelor’s degrees and a growing number of white upper- and middle-class households. Today, more than a quarter of the population are post-Katrina transplants, and their desires are clearly reflected in the wood-fire-oven pizzerias, craft-cocktail bars, artisan bakeries, and authentic taquerias that now proliferate in the city.

If these businesses resemble what’s found in other American metropolises, that’s appropriate, because New Orleans now resembles the rest of America in ways that it did not before Katrina caused its citizens to reappraise the city’s long dance on the razor’s edge. The palate of residents new and old is now informed by a hankering for things beyond great étouffée, like affordable housing, effective governance, and quality education—services a city so enamored of its reputation for hospitality ought to take pride in delivering. This is inarguably a positive development, even if it means that more people are eating avocado toast.

Brigtsen celebrates the dining scene that has blossomed in the reimagined city as “just part of the same continuum that New Orleans has been on for two hundred and ninety seven years.” Embracing change is part of being a traditionalist around here; Brigtsen plates his rémoulade with guacamole, after all. When he told me that he’d be “hard pressed to name one or two” post-Katrina New Orleans restaurants that fit his “definition of Creole,” he did so without rancor. His version of New Orleans cooking is the one that the country rushed to save a decade ago, the food that buoyed everyone who occupied the traumatized city. Chefs aren’t opening many restaurants like Brigtsen’s anymore. But if his food ends up disappearing in the storm’s aftermath, Brigtsen's legacy will still be secure. New Orleans cooking has returned to its natural state of flux. Katrina didn’t deliver a fatal blow.

Brett Anderson has been restaurant critic and features writer at NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune since 2001.